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Category: kanji

I have just added a vocab list consisting of 669 entries, which has been recommended for the introductory level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT).

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be scoring each of the entries according to how well the English keyword associated with each kanji would prepare a beginner for the meaning of the actual Japanese word using that kanji. Scores will range from 0/5 (the keyword is no help at all) to 5/5 (a student armed with nothing but the keyword would guess the correct meaning). An example of a 5/5 entry is ‘青‘, meaning ‘blue’, which is exactly what the keyword would lead us to expect. An example of a 4/5 entry is ‘後‘, meaning ‘afterwards’, which is related to the keyword ‘behind’ but not quite the same.

I’ll publish the results here, for people who are wondering how well a Heisig-style approach will prepare them for learning real vocabulary.

I just read an old thread over at Tae Kim’s Blog. Tae Kim runs a very useful website for learning Japanese, but in this particular thread he wrote rather dismissively of the Heisig approach to learning kanji. (If you are not familiar with the concept, here is a brief description). Tae Kim invited comments from Heisig fans, and it is the thread of comments under his post that provides the most useful insights.

Tae Kim opened his post with a condescending truism:

Just a quick post since I’ve been very lazy lately. I just wanted to ask: Is there anybody in the world that learned how to write Japanese with James W. Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji? And notice I didn’t say Kanji because I’m sick and tired of hearing people say, “Yeah, I learned like 2,000 kanji in like three weeks!” Wow, that’s awesome. Now you can start actually learning Japanese!

With these comments, Tae Kim might as well be criticising KSP, which adopts an approach similar to Heisig. And guess what? His truism is, well, true! Knowing 2000 kanji is nothing like knowing Japanese.

If you are wondering if KSP will be useful for you, read the comments below the post. If the criticisms of Heisig seem to resonate, KSP probably won’t be your thing. KSP does nothing more than take a Heisig approach to kanji and add a range of memory-enhancing tools: motor involvement, spaced repetition with automated revision scheduling, automated hints, incorporation of images in mnemonics, and (eventually) a full supply of mnemonics for the entire joyo kanji. After all, if you do have to learn more than 2000 symbols, you might as well make it as efficient as possible.

Just like Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji, you need to be mindful of what KSP doesn’t do – and doesn’t even try to do – and that’s teach you how to use kanji in context.

It’s not that Heisig or anyone else has forgotten the gulf between knowing kanji and knowing Japanese. Far from it. The idea is that you’ll use other resources to learn Japanese – after you’ve learned your kanji, perhaps, or concurrently with your kanji learning, if that’s your preference. But as you “start actually learning Japanese”, you’ll have the advantage of seeing familiar kanji everywhere you look, and of knowing one meaning for each kanji. That one meaning will provide you with a cognitive hook, making the task of learning contextual kanji that much easier. Basically, it is a strategy of divide and conquer. Learn one set of symbol-meaning mappings first, and add the vocab later. The alternative is to try to link each meaning with an unknown symbol and an unknown pronunciation all at once – which is famously difficult.

Of course, this divide-and-conquer approach doesn’t suit everyone. But it makes perfectly good sense in terms of the neuropsychology of memory. And it’s downright silly to imagine that proponents of the divide-and-conquer approach have somehow forgotten that the divided task is not the full task. In fact, it’s the whole point of the approach.

Welcome to what will be a recurring feature here at the KSP website – a picture quiz covering a block of kanji. In this case, all the kanji come from the first 200 kanji in the KSP sequence.

Apart from the first picture below, none of the images look like kanji in the traditional sense – most of them don’t even contain anything that looks like a stroke. Nonetheless, to anyone familiar with the notion of kanji as collections of simple ideas, the identity of each kanji is reasonably clear. (If not, read through the first few lessons on this site and then return to the quiz.) Of course, there are other ways to test your kanji knowledge, including drawing them in the KSP app, but the idea of these quizzes will be to reinforce the notion of kanji as meaningful, memorable pictures.

For more information on how to set up the app with your own pictures for each kanji, check out the Youtube demo.

I’ve just added two plugins to this site that provide a link between kanji and their keywords.

The first plugin provides hover text to translate kanji back to keywords. The plugin still needs a little tweaking, but try hovering your mouse (or tapping with your finger on a touch-screen) over the 水 kanji.

The hover tip does not currently appear when the kanji is part of a word, is next to an html tag, or in a few other settings. To make sure your comments have the correct hover tips, so that other beginners can keep track of what kanji you are discussing, it’s safest to put the kanji in parentheses like this… (水).

(The plugin does not currently provide hover text on the home page, which lists multiple posts, but works when those posts are visited individually. This should be fixed soon.)

The second addition is a text-replacement plugin that should make life easier for people wanting to enter kanji into their PC or mobile phone when they want to make a comment in the forum. Although many people already have their phones setup for entering kanji, people at the start of their kanji journey are not likely to know how to do this, or don’t know the vocabulary that would be needed to use a standard kanji-entry system.

On this site, text within forum entries will pass through a filter so that combinations like :keyword: will be replaced with the appropriate kanji. For instance, : water : (but without the spaces) will become 水.

You can combine both of these effects by typing ( : water : ) without the spaces, which is exactly what I did to produce the above kanji.

Note that, if the kanji has been recognised by the hover plugin, it will be marked with a shadow.

The latest version of the Android app is introducing a new method of defining kanji radicals – just drag your finger over the start of the first and last stroke in the radical, as shown in this Youtube demo…

Here is a quick preview of the KSP app for Android… Basically, the app lets you draw kanji on the touch screen of your mobile phone, assesses how well you know the kanji, and schedules revisions. It also allows you to create mnemonics for the kanji, using both text and images.